the shore, plucking himself away from embraces that held him to the land like some deep-rooted oak, for the sail-wings were ready to bear him to the realm of sea and sky. He soon reached the wharf, and as the dawn broke in the east the flag-ship majestically ran inshore to take the new Argonaut on board. The fluttering sails, the hurried manoeuvers of the crew, the boatswain's whistle, and the cries of the sailors as the ships got under way, announced a speedy departure, and attracted the early risen villagers to the shore in their natural desire to witness the scene, and to bid farewell to departing friends and loved ones. When Columbus sprang from the skiff on board the caravel, and the anchors were weighed, a shudder ran alike through

authorities, the name of caravel was generically given in Columbus's time to any vessel of burden, whatever its size and strength. "A long and narrow single-decked vessel, with a beak at the prow," says our dictionary of Castilian authorities, to which we turn as to an oracle in the matter of national idioms. This definition, in truth, cannot be bettered in its first part, if able nautical treatises are to be trusted. But when that classical dictionary adds that a caravel has three masts of nearly equal size, with three large lateen yards and sails, some emendation seems needful; for though the three ships of Columbus were called caravels, only one of them carried the kind of sail thus described, and that was the smallest and the frailest of them,

the departing sailors and the leave-takers on the strand. Where they were going they knew, but as their westward course after leaving Cadiz and the Canaries was to take them far beyond those lately won islands, none knew whither they were bound or the duration of the voyage. The cross floated above the flag-ship, which bore seaward toward the unknown, seeking mysteries perchance impenetrable and inaccessible to the human mind and unconquerable by human will. As we have elsewhere said, the caravel was better fitted for the task of discovery than any other bark of that day. Stout and big enough to withstand the shock of waves, it was at the same time sufficiently light and shallow of draft to enter the mouths of rivers and to tack with ease in narrow channels. According to nautical

the Niña. Our dictionary is also in conflict with the classic texts of seamanship when it asserts caravels to be dangerous because of their shallow draft, being easily capsized unless their sails were quickly trimmed, when unimpeachable masters of maritime science and experience declare them to have been stanch and stout enough for the needs of those times. The Columbian caravels were at most of eighty tons burden, and had a square poop surmounted by a high castle, to match the smaller castle at the bow. Squaresails were sometimes carried, but caravels were generally lateen-rigged. Nevertheless, the definition of one versed in those matters makes the caravels of larger size than is commonly supposed, and describes them as stanch and fleet, with high castles at stem and

discovery, for these two great unities were the necessary nucleus about which to garner the innumerable harvest of new lands amid the waves, and the bright constellations of new beliefs in the human soul. He notes how the sovereigns had granted him the style of Don, with the titles of Admiral and Viceroy, to descend to his heirs and successors forever.

The journal serves not alone to disclose the motives of his undertaking; it also exhibits its course day by day. The first three days at sea were favorable. Having set sail on Friday, by the following Sunday they had run some fifty Castilian leagues. But on the fourth day the Pinta was imperiled by a defect in her steeringgear, and although the admiral ran up within speaking distance, he could not assist her, fearing a collision, for the wind and the waves were rising. The two owners of the vessel had designedly weakened the rudder, in order to disable her, and to prevent her from going on and being lost, as they deemed the other caravels must surely be, in the storms of the Shadowy Sea. Columbus confided the repairs to his skilful captain, who took temporary command of her. The injury called for workmanship superior to any at command in the watery wastes, and so there was no recourse but to head for the Canaries. They sighted the nearest of the group, Lanzarote, and went on to the Grand Canary, whence they were constrained to go to Gomera, only to return again to the Grand Canary. The first idea of Columbus was to fit out another caravel, in view of the unseaworthiness of the Pinta, but none could be found at Gomera. He was obliged to fit a new rudder to the Pinta, and to supply the Niña with squaresails in place of her lateen rig, before they were enabled to proceed. Their departure was indeed urgent, for a most untoward mishap was to be feared in the expected arrival in the outlying islands of the group of a fleet fitted out by the king of Portugal, and despatched to the furthest limits of the sea then known for the purpose of preventing the passage of Columbus. Yet, despite the tireless activity of the discoverer in hastening the work, the repairs and the procurement of provisions occupied a whole month.

At last, on September 16, the explorers turned their backs upon the known seas and launched forth into the unknown. The Pinta led the way, closely followed by the Santa Maria flying the standard of command, and lastly came the Niña. The little fleet seemed a living poem, and the obstacles now past, like those hurled against the heroes of olden epics by adverse gods, became mere symbols of the evil inherent in our nature and spreading as a subtle venom through all creation.

There is a lack of agreement as to the part the Genoese pilot and the mariner of Palos

respectively played toward the discovery of the New World. Columbus excelled his helpmate in the abstract sciences, in intuitive imagination, and in inspiration, but Pinzon assuredly excelled Columbus in experience, in shrewdness, in administrative ability, in aptness to command, in power of discipline and organization, in everything executive, effective, and practical. Pinzon was a skilful financier in controlling the expenses of the little fleet, a good administrator in equipping the ships, a consummate commander in enrolling and disciplining the crew; but he was in no wise a revealer, such as Columbus is proclaimed to have been by the voice of all peoples and all ages. When we see Pinzon assembling the crews after the royal deputies and alcaldes had failed; equipping the fleet in but fifteen days when Columbus and his agents had not been able to do so in three months; supplying from his own purse the deficiency in the royal contribution; navigating the dangerously damaged Pinta from Cadiz to the Canaries; and when later we are to behold him rising to greater achievements than all these, bringing resolute decision to the accomplishment of his purposes, we may truly say, without detracting from the splendid height to which Columbus rose, that there is still a place in the epic of this titanic exploration for the grand figure of the pilot and shipbuilder of Palos, who not only rendered the departure of the expedition possible, but who, the voyage once begun, was perhaps the most resolute and powerful of will in preventing its failure.

Early in September they left the Canaries behind, and plunged into the abyss of ocean. It was growing urgent that Columbus should do this, for in the eyes of his companions the most ordinary phenomena became celestial warnings. In the clear, half-Andalusian, halftropical nights of the Canaries rose the deepfurrowed violet cone of the volcano of Teneriffe, in crimson eruption, like a new sun springing into birth, shooting its iris-tinted flames through clouds of smoky ashes, with torrents of stony fragments like falling meteors or glowing like an incandescent milky way-all this filled them with dread, for they deemed the flaring mountain some vast Cyclops, imprisoned there by the divine hand at the uttermost portals of the known earth, to bar the pathway to the unknown world. Columbus showed them the error of their superstition, and how the selfsame phenomena were repeated on the familiar shores of Etruria, Italy, Sicily, and Greece. But although their dread was speedily tranquilized by his marvelous eloquence, any unforeseen and fortuitous occurrence threatened to revive their fears and to wreck the plan through uncontrollable panic. At length a favoring easterly breeze sprang up, and the ships sped arrow

like on their course. The land soon sank from view, and the explorers found themselves alone with sea and sky.

As the astute Genoese well divined the dread which the ever-increasing distance was certain to arouse, he kept two log-books, one for himself and the other for the crew. In the former he recorded the actual run, in the latter a lesser distance; by which device he diminished the fears and restrained the impatience of his susceptible shipmates. But in doing this an unforeseen complication arose. Their sure guide, the compass, that ever had pointed fixedly to the north, began to waver. Although this phenomenon had been known for two centuries,though many say it had never been observed until then, the crew gave themselves up for lost, and imagined that for them even the one fixed point was shifting, as though God had cast them off. Columbus recognized the necessity of explaining this phenomenon as he had explained the volcanoes. But the explanation was not easy, for while the volcanoes were like others already known, it was impossible to understand or explain the variation of the needle by any familiar fact or experience.

It seems strange that these pilots of Palos and Genoa should have been ignorant of a fact like the variation of the compass, touching which, as some assert, there then existed dissertations in the library of the Vatican, that storehouse of astronomical and nautical treatises indispensable to one who, like the pontiff, aspired through his religious power and universal authority to dominate all the earth. But this deviation, which is noticed in each latitude until it becomes an oscillation at the equator and is reversed in the southern hemisphere, may possibly have been observed before that time, although it remained without plausible explanation; and so it remains, even in our day, one of those occult mysteries which surround the countless facts recorded in the tables of intellectual progress. Sailors call this inexplicable deviation of the needle "nor'-nor'westing." Columbus accounted for it partly by the shifting of the polar star, partly by the center of attraction not being in that star, but in some other opaque body near the pole, and by countless other specious reasons evolved from his fecund fancy. The crew, however, remained incredulous, unsatisfied by the persuasive words of the discoverer. In the southern temperament nervous impatience predominates. A northerner generalizes less than a southron. We Spaniards cannot see a thing begun without instantly deducing all its consequences, nor hear a thing planned without fancying it already done. To such plastic imaginations fancies appear as solid realities.

The admiral's earnest attention was now

given to signs of land, which to his anxious mind seemed to be so near. On the spur of the moment, when Pinzon, who was best able to comprehend him, came within hailing distance, he would converse with him through the speaking-trumpet, or exhibit imaginative charts, drawn by himself, on which appeared the island of Cipango, set in those very latitudes through his erroneous conception of ocean's limits. At times in some insignificant object he would discern a trace of the vanished Atlantis of Plato merged in the watery abysses. Soon after quitting the Canaries, a broken mast floated by, which to the malcontents seemed an omen of the punishment reserved for their temerity, the proof of some terrible wreck suffered by others who had dared to clutch at old ocean's secrets, and to violate the mystery wherewith the inscrutable will of Providence had shrouded the sea. Passing patches of sea-wrack served to confirm a statement in Aristotle's "Natural History" touching the abundance of tunny-fish beyond the Fortunate Isles. Any stray bird was a prophecy. Columbus was especially encouraged by the small size and frailness of those

he saw, for they could live only on land, near human habitations or among cultivated fields where they could find proper food. With singular acumen he remarked that these birds did not appear to be exhausted, and consequently could not have flown far from these inhabited spots. Whales, too, afforded him like encouragement. Several of these cetaceans suddenly appeared, spouting high as they basked on the gentle swell; and he at once reverted to his pilot's experience and knowledge of natural history, declaring that such creatures never ventured far from the coast, because they love the land. On one occasion, espying a crab clinging to a broken bough, he carefully netted and guarded it as a positive sign that fluvial waters must be near. When all else failed, he dipped up water from the vessel's wake, and, tasting it, compared it to water he had tested in other times and places, estimating from its greater or less saltiness the amount of admixed fresh water from neighboring mountains or plains. A pelican plunged him into a fever of hope. These birds resemble swans, but are of heavier build, with plumage of pearly whiteness, long and flexible necks, serrated beaks, and webbed feet. Being equally adapted to live on shore or on water, they stow the sea-caught fish in their capacious pouches, and carry them to the land, there to devour them at leisure among the trees. All around them was bright; the calm sea smelt as sweet as the Guadalquivir overhung by arching orange-bloom; the trade-wind fanned their brows and refreshed their frames; shoals of leaping dolphins played beside the hulls; and flocks of land-birds followed the sails aloft, while the